Air Force Reports On The Roswell UFO Incident - Mogul Flight 4 Reconstruction

Mogul Flight 4 Reconstruction

Soon after the release of the Air Force report, Charles Moore, who was on the Mogul launch team back in 1947, decided to attempt to reconstruct the probable flight path of Project Mogul flight 4, which was lost and never recovered, and which was identified by the Air Force as the probable source of the debris recovered at the Foster ranch.

Some researchers such as Kevin Randle had suggested that the wind directions on the day of the Mogul launch eliminated that flight as a possible candidate, but Moore knew that wind directions and therefore balloon flight paths are not so easily deduced because these balloons rose into the stratosphere. While winds in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) would vary, upper atmosphere (stratosphere) wind direction was constantly from the east in the summer, Moore knew from experience.

The difficulty in reconstructing flight 4 was that aside from a diary entry, there was little information on where it flew, and only hints as to what tracking devices were on the flight. The latter was important, as radars, sonobuoys and theodolites were used initially for tracking Mogul flights, only to be later discarded in favour of radiosondes as flights proved to drift well beyond the circa 40-mile tracking range of radar. Records for other flights exist, and they show that flight 2 had rawin reflectors for radar tracking, but flight 5 had a radiosonde. Moore deduced that the fact that flight 4 was lost strongly suggested that flight 5’s use of a radiosonde for tracking was a direct result of the inability to track flight 4 with radar. Of course, if flight 4 didn’t have radar reflectors, it could not have been the source of the debris on the Foster ranch.

Moore obtained as much local weather and atmospheric information as he could, and used the data obtained from flights 5 and 6 to calibrate the likely direction of travel once flight 4 entered the stratosphere. He had to modify some of the original NYU records owing to an error he identified whereby the azimuths were altered by about 12 degrees to account for the magnetic declination of Alamogordo, an alteration that had the effect of significantly exaggerating the altitude of the balloons. He additionally took into account the time of day the balloons were launched (recorded in the diary) as this would affect the speed of ascent and factor into how long the balloons would stay aloft.

The result was a track that placed flight 4 very close to the Foster ranch. Other flights, such as 5 and 6, could not have landed anywhere close owing to the differing wind conditions on the following days. Moore’s analysis, while not proving that flight 4 was the source of the Foster ranch debris, nevertheless confirmed that flight 4 could not be eliminated as that source.

Others have disputed Moore’s findings as designed to confirm the predetermined landing site, but Moore’s intention was only to see if flight 4 could have landed on the ranch, not to prove that it did. In the end, the only “certainty” which could have been gained by Moore’s research was if it demonstrated that flight 4 could not have landed on the ranch in question, as reproducing precisely the journey of that flight is probably impossible.

David Rudiak has posted a detailed rebuttal to Moore’s analysis, saying “he improperly calculated his own data and hoaxed his own model. In the end, he simply force-fit the trajectory he wanted.” But, as so often is the case with Roswell debates, Rudiak’s rebuttal has its own detailed rebuttal.